“Telecommunication” generally refers to the transmission of signals (e.g., electrical, electromagnetic or optical signals) over some distance for the purpose of communication. Various communication devices and methodologies increasingly are becoming part of the everyday lives of people all over the world; this is particularly noteworthy in developing nations and regions which, until recently, have had little if any appreciable infrastructure to support telecommunications on a significant scale. Some common examples of conventional communication devices used for telecommunications include, but are not limited to, “landline” telephones, mobile (or “cellular”) phones and other mobile/portable terminal devices, fax machines, devices that receive cable and/or digital television, and a wide variety of computing devices, any of which may make use of a variety of wired or wireless communication infrastructures employing a variety of analog or digital signal forms and communication protocols.
Mobile telephones and other mobile/portable terminal devices (e.g., personal digital assistants, or “PDAs”) conventionally have been used primarily for wireless telecommunication activities such as voice calls and text messaging; more recent iterations of these devices support electronic mail (“email”) and Internet access. These devices continue to evolve into multi-purpose instruments for engaging in commerce (for example, performing balance transfers and paying for third party services and products) and for performing various tasks beyond simply placing and receiving telephone calls, sending/receiving text messages and email, and limited Internet access.
In a conventional arrangement with an Operator, an owner/User of a Mobile Device or other communication device establishes a subscription or an Account with the Operator (i.e., the owner's carrier or the carrier servicing the owner at a given time), typically pursuant to a service agreement, wherein the Account of the owner (also called a “Subscriber” or “account holder” in such an arrangement) may be credited with funds to be used to pay for various telecommunication and other services provided by or through the Operator, and debited based on use of such services. The Account is associated with an Account ID, which typically includes one or more numbers that uniquely identify the Account (e.g., a telephone number), and may additionally include one or more other identifiers for the Mobile Device or other communication device, and/or one or more user names (e.g., the name of the Subscriber, or a name chosen by the Subscriber) or other information relating to one or more Users.
While an Account associated with a Mobile Device often has only one associated Subscriber, it should be appreciated that in some instances there may be multiple Users of the same Mobile Device, and indeed the actual identity of some or all of these Users may be unknown to the Operator (i.e., at least some of the Users may be anonymous to the Operator). Since the identity of a User may or may not be known to an Operator, Account IDs generally include one or more numbers relating to one or more Mobile Devices themselves, relating to the Account and/or relating to access to the device (as opposed to only identifiers associated more specifically with actual Users of a given Mobile Device).
To this end, a Mobile Device may include a subscriber identity module (a removable “SIM card”) on which is stored an “International Mobile Subscriber Identity” number (IMSI), which is a unique number used to identify to an Operator a Subscriber who is using a Mobile Device in which the SIM card is installed. Upon power-up of the Mobile Device, the device sends the IMSI to the Operator via a local network (if one is available to the Mobile Device). In addition to the IMSI, the SIM card also may store, for example, security authentication and ciphering information, passwords, temporary information relating to a local network in which the Mobile Device is being used, a list of services that may be accessed, and the like.
A “Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number” (MSISDN) is another number which may in some circumstances be used by the network to communicate with a Mobile Device. In particular, whereas an IMSI is an ID number uniquely associated with a SIM card installed in a Mobile Device, an MSISDN is the telephone number normally dialed to access the Mobile Device in which the SIM card is installed. MSISDNs may be different than IMSIs, and accordingly MSISDNs are generally mapped to IMSIs (e.g., in a database maintained by the Operator); in this manner, multiple different MSISDNs may be associated with the same IMSI/SIM card, and/or an MSISDN associated with a given IMSI/SIM card may change over time (to accommodate number portability).
Thus, with respect to an Account ID, one or both of an MSISDN and an IMSI constitute exemplary identifiers that may be used to identify to an Operator an Account of a Subscriber/account holder. More generally, as noted above, an Account ID may include one or more identifiers associated with the Mobile Device itself (e.g., an IMSI for a SIM card installed in a Mobile Device), one or more identifiers associated with the Mobile Device's access points or connectivity to a communications network (e.g., an MSISDN, an IP address, a mobile station identification, etc.), and in some cases one or more identifiers associated with one or more Subscribers or other Users.
Conventional subscriptions with Operators include both “post-pay” (or “post-paid”) and “pre-pay” types of Accounts (Prepaid Accounts). In post-pay accounts, the Operator bills the Subscriber after the fact for telecommunications and other services rendered and used (e.g., at the end of every month for services used during that month). In contrast, for a Prepaid Account (also sometimes commonly referred to as “prepaid phone service”), a Subscriber or other User may pre-pay a certain monetary amount, essentially at any time, that is credited to a particular Account established with the Operator and associated with an Account ID. In some instances, an Operator might offer preferred product/service consumption rates for a Prepaid Account, as the Operator incurs virtually no risk of non-payment or of delays in payment; indeed, the Operator may even get free use of any funds in a Prepaid Account until they are consumed. In other instances, an Operator might charge more expensive per-use rates for communication services rendered to prepaid Users, as prepaid Users' consumption may be less stable from month to month than postpaid Users' consumption. Other types of Accounts combine prepaid and postpaid functionalities. For example, there are various types of “hybrid” accounts that are postpaid during certain times of day or days of the week, and prepaid during other times. One example of such a hybrid account is known as Hybrid Corporate Plans. This type of Account is postpaid from 9 am to 6 pm (with the postpaid bill being paid by a corporation) and prepaid at other times (with the “out of office” usage being paid by the employee in a prepaid manner). Another example of combined prepaid and postpaid functionalities can be found in “controlled” accounts, in which the postpaid account has a monthly consumption limit (expressed in monetary terms). When that limit is reached, the service is cut, but the User may Top Up to obtain further services, in a prepaid manner. Combined Accounts such as hybrid accounts and controlled accounts typically include both a postpaid account and a Prepaid Account.
To Top-Up a then pre-existing Prepaid Account, a User may purchase a “Top-Up card” or “recharge card” at retail (e.g., via a kiosk or merchant). Typically, such cards have a predetermined value (e.g., U.S. $5, $10, $20) and are stamped with a unique code (e.g., under a scratch-off panel) representing the card vendor and the prepaid amount. The code on the Top-Up card is entered on the Mobile Device to appropriately credit the Prepaid Account (i.e., add to the balance of the Prepaid Account) and thereby effect the Top-Up. In some rare instances, a service fee for the Top-Up (e.g., a fee payable to the card vendor) may be deducted from the Top-Up card purchase price prior to crediting the Prepaid Account. In any event, funds available in a Prepaid Account generally are strictly limited to the Top-Up amounts provided by one or more Users. From the foregoing, it may be appreciated that a Top-Up usually constitutes an anonymous transaction in that an Operator may not necessarily know who is responsible for providing funds to a Prepaid Account. Other ways of Topping Up are described above.
Following a Top-Up, the Operator thereafter debits the Prepaid Account based on products and/or services provided by or through the Operator corresponding to the Account ID. In some cases, Prepaid Accounts may have time limits within which prepaid amounts must be used before they expire (e.g., 90 days from the date of the most recent Top-Up). In these cases, if additional credit is not added before the expiration (i.e., if there is no pre-expiration Top-Up), some or all of any remaining balance in the Prepaid Account may be lost, and the Operator may even discontinue service.
While the concept of a Prepaid Account is introduced above primarily in the context of a Mobile Device and a mobile/wireless telecommunications Operator, it should be appreciated that a Prepaid Account is not limited in this respect, and also extends to non-mobile applications (e.g., landline phones, internet access, cable TV, pay-per-view TV, and wired/land-based telecommunication Operators). For non-mobile applications, Prepaid Accounts often are used for long-distance calling but in some instances also are used for other purposes. Indeed, a single Prepaid Account could be configured for use in connection with both mobile and non-mobile calling by the account holder.
Prepaid Accounts for mobile or non-mobile applications often may be adopted by Users with weak finances and/or poor credit ratings. Sometimes the need to utilize a Prepaid Account results from an Operator refusing to provide credit to such Users (i.e., in the form of a post-pay Account) or limiting the amount of credit extended. In other instances, Prepaid Accounts may simply be a convenience adopted even by Users with good credit. In any event, the market for Prepaid Accounts is huge—currently, there are more than three billion Users contributing to Prepaid Accounts worldwide, with more than 250 million Users in Latin America alone. On average, these Users Top-Up Prepaid Accounts in amounts of about U.S. $10 per month (at current prices and exchange rates).
As noted above, today a variety of Mobile Devices are used for much more than simply placing voice calls. Many Mobile Devices have the capability, for example, to display images and stream videos, take and transmit photos, access the Internet, download applications, download and play or stream music or other digital media content, purchase books and other digital content electronically (e.g., from the Internet), acquire and transmit the device's location information (e.g., GPS information), and perform financial transactions (transfers and payments) in a secure manner. In many places around the world, such Mobile Devices provide Users with not only their first telecommunications device, but also their first camera, their first music player, their first video player, their first access to the Internet, and their first mobile wallet.
Large industries have been established to deliver, and charge for, a wide variety of products and services that may be purchased via Mobile Devices and other communication devices. Some products and services provided by SOPPs are delivered directly to a Mobile Device or other communication device (e.g., purchased music, images, photographs, videos, ringtones, applications, horoscopes and the like). In other situations, a Mobile Device or other communication device may be essentially a terminal for executing a transaction for the purchase of goods or services to be delivered in other ways (e.g., buying a ticket for public transportation or for the movies, or buying a physical good to be delivered by a package to a home or office), or for transferring funds from a mobile banking Prepaid Account to another User on another Mobile Device, or simply to that User's account at a bank (such use of a Mobile Device for financial services such as balance transfers is often referred to as “Mobile Banking” or “Banking the Unbanked”). Furthermore, while often a User of a Mobile Device initiates a transaction for the purchase of a product and/or service from a SOPP (sometimes referred to as a “pull” transaction), in some instances a SOPP may offer a product and/or service on a “push” transaction basis; i.e., without a User initiating a particular transaction, a SOPP may “automatically” deliver some products and/or services to a Mobile Device or another communication device associated with a particular Account, pursuant to a subscription agreement or by other pre-arrangement (e.g., “automatic” alerts relating to sports events/teams, financial information, particular news or entertainment events, etc.).
FIGS. 1 and 2 generally illustrate the parties to a conventional transaction for the purchase of products and/or services (including financial services and balance transfers) from a third party SOPP (which may be a financial institution in the case of a transaction for a financial service) by a User of a Mobile Device associated with a Prepaid Account with an Operator, and the sequence of information flow between the parties for an exemplary “pull” transaction. In these figures, an exemplary Mobile Device 100 is associated with a Prepaid Account 300 for telecommunication services provided by or through an Operator 200. While a Mobile Device 100 is used in this illustration, it should be appreciated that other types of communication devices similarly may have a Prepaid Account with an Operator and similarly may purchase goods and/or services in the manner described in connection with FIGS. 1 and 2. In general, the Operator 200 maintains an “operator platform,” e.g., various computing equipment, switching systems, transmission systems and other network infrastructure to provide telecommunications services and maintain various information relevant to Subscriber Accounts, including the Prepaid Account 300 (e.g., such information may include at least an Account ID and a credit/debit balance for each Account).
In the example transaction illustrated in FIGS. 1 and 2, the operator platform of the Operator 200 also includes an interface to a network 150 and an interface to a network 700. The Operator 200 may be communicatively coupled to Mobile Device 100 through network 150 and may be communicatively coupled to a third party SOPP 500 through network 700. Mobile Device 100 may also have an interface to network 150; and SOPP 500 may also have an interface to network 700. It should be appreciated that the Operator, one or more Mobile Devices, and one or more third party SOPPs may be communicatively coupled by any of a variety of communication means and protocols. Networks 150 and 700 may be separate networks, the same network, or overlapping or non-overlapping portions of a larger network. Each of networks 150 and 700 may be implemented as any type or form of communication network, including (but not limited to) wired, wireless, local- or wide-area networks, cellular networks and the Internet. Any of them may be public or private. In one example, network 150 is a wireless cellular radio network through which Mobile Device 100 and Operator 200 communicate, and network 700 is the Internet, through which Operator 200 and SOPP 500 communicate using any combination of wired and/or wireless connections (e.g., via the Internet). Further, while only one Mobile Device and only one third party SOPP are shown for simplicity in the example of FIGS. 1 and 2, it should be appreciated that multiple Mobile Devices and/or third party SOPPs may be communicatively coupled to the Operator 200. Similarly, a third party SOPP may provide products and/or services in conjunction with more than one Operator.
In connection with one or more third party SOPPs to which the Operator 200 may be communicatively coupled and with which it may have relationships, the operator platform maintained by the Operator 200 also may include information germane to facilitating the purchase of products and/or services from one or more third party SOPPs (e.g., the operator platform may maintain identifying information for a given third party SOPP, one or more SOPP Accounts for third party SOPPs, appropriate accounting information so that Accounts of Subscribers may be appropriately debited and credited as necessary based on transactions with one or more third party SOPPs or the Operator itself as a SOPP, etc.).
In FIG. 1, a User of the Mobile Device 100 initiates a “pull” transaction to purchase a product and/or service from the third party SOPP 500, as indicated by the query “A,” which is transmitted first to the Operator 200 (e.g., via network 150, which may include a wireless communication link to which the Mobile Device has access). The query “A” generally includes the Account ID for the Prepaid Account 300 associated with the Mobile Device 100, and some information that identifies the requested product and/or service. The Operator 200 identifies the SOPP from the query “A” (e.g., via information maintained by the operator platform that associates the requested product and/or service with the SOPP who provides it) and, if the Operator 200 does not already have stored information mapping the requested product and/or service to a purchase price, passes the query “A”, or a subset of the query “A”, to the SOPP 500 (e.g., via a network 700 such as the Internet).
The SOPP 500 then sends a message “B” to the Operator 200, including the Account ID from the query “A”, and either the purchase price for the product and/or service requested in the query “A,” or a product/service identifier from which the Operator 200 can determine the purchase price of the requested product/service (e.g., via information maintained by the operator platform in connection with the SOPP 500). In some instances, it should be appreciated that the purchase price provided by the SOPP for the requested product/service may not necessarily be an actual/fixed price but rather an estimate; for example, if the product/service requested relates to a data transmission of unknown or uncertain length, for which the required time and/or bandwidth to complete the transmission may not be known with certainty a priori (e.g., voice or data flows), the SOPP may estimate a purchase price for the transaction, or a unit price for increments of the transaction, and provide this information as part of the message “B”.
The Operator 200 then determines (e.g., via the operator platform's billing/account information) if there are sufficient funds in the Prepaid Account 300 corresponding to the Account ID provided in message “B” to cover the purchase price (or, for a financial service such as a balance transfer or payment to a third party, the amount to be transferred or paid out from the Prepaid Account 300 for the transaction). If so, as shown in FIG. 2, the Operator 200 sends an authorization message “X” to the SOPP 500, and the SOPP 500 then transfers to the Mobile Device 100, via the Operator 200, the product and/or service in communication “Y”. Alternatively, if the product/service is of a type that is not necessarily delivered directly to the Mobile Device 100 itself, the communication “Y” may be a message confirming completion of the transaction. Also, if the product and/or service is already stored at the Operator 200 prior to the transaction, communication “Y” may be initiated at the Operator 200 and delivered to the Mobile Device 100, without need for communication “X” or for involvement of the SOPP 500 in communication “Y”. The Operator 200 appropriately debits the Prepaid Account 300 in the amount of the purchase price (the Operator may do this before passing on the communication “Y” to the Mobile Device, during delivery of the communication “Y”, or after delivery of the communication “Y”). The Operator 200 also issues a corresponding credit to the SOPP 500 in the amount of the purchase price (e.g., in a manner similar to the Prepaid Account 300 associated with the Mobile Device 100, the operator platform may include a SOPP Account associated with the SOPP 500 that may be appropriately credited and debited by the Operator 200).
The foregoing process is summarized in the flow diagram shown in FIG. 3. FIG. 3 illustrates the case in which the product/service and price information are stored at the SOPP 500 rather than at the Operator 200; however, as discussed above, the process may be altered accordingly if the price information and/or the product/service itself are already stored at the Operator 200. In particular, as indicated in block 10, the Mobile Device 100 first sends the purchase query “A” to the Operator 200, with the Account ID for the Prepaid Account 300 and product/service/vendor information. In block 20, the Operator passes the purchase query “A” to the appropriate third party SOPP 500, and in block 30 the SOPP replies to the Operator with the message “B” including the Account ID from the query “A” and information relating to the purchase price. In block 40, the Operator replies to the SOPP with the authorization message “X” indicating that the Prepaid Account 300 has sufficient funds for the purchase, and then in block 50 the SOPP sends the product/service in the communication “Y” (or a purchase confirmation message) to the Mobile Device via the Operator. Finally, in block 60, the Operator deducts the purchase price from the Prepaid Account 300 and credits the SOPP 500 for same.
Although the process outlined in FIGS. 1-3 illustrates a “pull” transaction for the purchase of a product and/or service from a third party SOPP 500, it should be appreciated that a similar, albeit somewhat simpler, process occurs if the SOPP for the product/service requested by a User of the Mobile Device 100 is the Operator 200 itself. In particular, the Operator 200, as a SOPP, would still attend to an authorization step after a purchase query from the Mobile Device 100 to ensure that the Prepaid Account 300 includes sufficient funds to cover the purchase price of the requested product and/or service. Similarly, for “push” transactions in which a product and/or service may be provided “automatically” by a SOPP for a particular price per transaction (e.g., pursuant to a subscription or other pre-arrangement), the Operator 200 would still attend to an authorization step to ensure sufficient funds exist in the Prepaid Account 300 prior to automatic delivery of the product/service.
As illustrated by the process outlined in FIGS. 1-3, if a User of the Mobile Device 100 associated with the Prepaid Account 300 desires to purchase goods and/or services from either the Operator 200 as a SOPP or the third party SOPP 500, or allow for successful push transactions from a SOPP, the Prepaid Account 300 needs to have sufficient funds to complete the transaction; if, on the other hand, the Prepaid Account 300 is depleted or has insufficient funds for the purchase, the transaction cannot be completed. In the case of voice or data flows, the call or download may be cut off when the Prepaid Account 300 becomes depleted, such that the transaction is only partially completed.
Accordingly, in some instances a User associated with a Prepaid Account may begin a purchase (“pull”) transaction only to find out during the attempted purchase that there are insufficient funds in the Prepaid Account. Similarly, a SOPP may attempt to deliver a product/service as a “push” transaction, and discover that there are insufficient funds in the Prepaid Account associated with the intended recipient. Under such circumstances, the transaction is interrupted and not completed at that time; if the User desires to continue with the purchase (or receive products/services automatically via push transactions), the User must Top-Up the Prepaid Account with sufficient funds. For example, as discussed above, a new prepaid Top-Up card of sufficient value must be purchased and credited to the Prepaid Account, or sufficient funds have to be otherwise electronically transferred to the Prepaid Account (e.g., via an ATM using a debit/credit card or through a balance transfer from a retail Top Up distributor). In some instances, the User may not have funds readily available to buy a prepaid Top-Up card or to conduct an electronic transfer of funds to Top-Up the Prepaid Account and, accordingly, the transaction is rejected and the revenue is lost. Even if the User does have funds available for a Top-Up, the Top-Up activity takes time and generally requires actions that interrupt the User's attempt to purchase the product and/or service—and in this lapse, the User's transaction, the User's interest in the purchase, and the context of the transaction also may be lost.
Many attempted purchases of products and/or services from a SOPP are impulse purchases and/or time sensitive (e.g., text message, download a ringtone or horoscope, purchase a song or game, etc.); accordingly, as a result of an interruption due to insufficient funds in a Prepaid Account, many attempted purchases by Users associated with Prepaid Accounts are never completed. More specifically, it is estimated that every month, over 10 billion attempts by Users to purchase products and/or services via a Mobile Device fail due to insufficient funds in a Prepaid Account.